Southern Highland Reader

SYLVA-I have a family picture of myself with my grandfather at about the age of six, taking in one of Nancy and Bruce Roberts’ ghost stories of the Old North State. We’re on the sofa at “Whitehall”, my grandparents old farmhouse in the rolling countryside near Mount Holly, and my eyes are as big as saucers.

The Roberts’ ghost books were among the ones I loved to death as a kid, leaving them invariably dog-eared and scrawled-upon. My aunt — a teenager at the time — took note, and often lead me aside to tell me ghostly falsehoods about the far-flung bedroom I spent my nights in when I visited.

So now, when I see my own six-year-old sleeping with a blanket wrapped firmly around her head to protect her from her own imagination, I can empathize.

Anyway, in spite of the numbers on the calendar the past week has been particularly Halloweeny, with brittle leaves blowing around under gray skies, so when I came across the story about Tennessee’s famous Bell Witch earlier today, I channeled specters of many a childhood tale.

We didn’t have as many sources for grimness in the early seventies, so we seized upon a few famous stories and woolied them to death. And the Bell Witch story is a good one, because it’s about poltergeists, and them things will work your scare buttons from several directions at once.

Here’s the story from the Tennessean, by way of the News-Sentinel, of one of the Bell Witch mysteries, now solved.